Hi there~I'm a terrible newbie who is making his very first AMV and I have a newbie sort of a question for the community. I see a lot of people using both Premiere and After Effects. So far, I've been using premiere for pretty much everything but I was wondering, what sort of tasks should I be using after effects for and what sort of tasks should I just continue doing in Premiere?

I personally use AE for any masking more complicated than a straight line or two or really basic masking for lipsync, any time I need to apply effect to several layers to achieve a certain look and i don't want to fight with mentally grasping nested projects in my premiere timeline, etc. And, of course, if i can make things better with particle effects.

Hmmm.... I'm guessing from the idea that I'm doing all my masking and such in photoshop and that I don't actually know what you mean by nested projects that I still have quite a lot to learn... Oh well. This is only my first AMV so I won't be too sad when it shows how much of a noob I am.

Thanks so much for the explanation. I'll have to do a lot more looking into what AE can do after my first AMV is done... which hopefully will be sometime this century. lol

Brad wrote:AE can really be thought of as Photoshop for video/motion. Almost anything you can do with Photoshop, you can do in AE (and sometimes, far more). It's got layers, visual effects, masking, etc. all right on the timeline. It really just depends on what it is you actually want to accomplish with a video. If you have an idea, like say "For this part of my video, I want to animate some original graphics on top of the video" or "I have some cool color correction stuff I want to do that I can't (or don't know how to) properly accomplish in Premiere" or "I want to mask out an animated sequence from one show and composite it into another" then open up AE and start figuring out how to do it.

What you don't want to do is bring your video into AE and just start adding random things to it, thinking that more = better. Plus, a lot of the time, you CAN accomplish a lot with just Premiere. I mean, a lot of Nostromo's "effects heavy" (quotations on purpose) videos were done entirely in Premiere, with no AE.

As far as tutorials go, you can always check out Video Copilot. A lot of people poopoo these tutorials because you end up seeing the results of the tutorials used everywhere (like, frame for frame, the same thing). But if you approach it the way you're supposed to, they're worthwhile. Don't watch a tutorial, follow it, then slap exactly what you did into a video and upload it saying "Look how good I am at AE!" Tutorials are meant to explain HOW the tools work, not "you should do this specific look in your work." Take the knowledge you learned from following the tutorial and apply it to your own ideas. And if you don't HAVE any ideas, then don't do it in the first place.

Basically what I'm getting at is, MOST of what you want to do in MOST AMV's can easily be accomplished with your editing program. Whether it be Premiere, Vegas, Magix, Final Cut, Windows Movie Maker, whatever. Likewise, you CAN also just straight up edit an entire video in AE (though I wouldn't recommend it unless you were already intimately familiar with AE) with just straight cuts. The important thing is to actually have ideas about what you want to do. What do you want your video to say? Are you under the impression that in order for it to be good it needs to look a certain way or pull off certain tricks? If you're brand new to editing AMV's, my biggest suggestion would be to find your own style and method, and then figure out how to make that happen. If it requires using AE, go for it! Play around. But if you just want to tell interesting stories using anime footage and music, then just stick to Premiere.